


Brushfire

by unbelieve



Category: American Vandal (TV)
Genre: M/M, it's angsty but we'll b okay
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2019-09-26 12:26:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17141732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unbelieve/pseuds/unbelieve
Summary: Sam and Peter broke up sophomore year of college, and that's supposed to be the end of it. Two years later, as a result of a mixup and mutual friends, they end up on the same post-graduation road trip. Peter doesn't know how to look at Sam and he doesn't know how to look away, and some things burn too deep to ever fully extinguish.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Secret Santa gift for Malia! I didn't know your AO3 username but I hope you like it and Merry Christmas!!

“So you and Sam broke up... why, exactly?” Peter’s friend Adrienne is pacing her bedroom, firing off texts every two seconds, because it is rapidly becoming evident that someone has made a mistake. 

Peter takes a deep breath, trying to keep the world from spinning out of control. “Uh, a lot of things I guess? A lot of little things. We argued a lot near the end and- and said a bunch of shit.”

There was definitely more to it, or at least he’s pretty sure there was. The fact that he can’t remember any of it at the moment is a little disconcerting, but Peter’s not really sure how to not be disoriented when it turns out one of the four other people on a cross country roadtrip is your ex-boyfriend. And of course, it couldn’t be the one he dated for a while his junior year of college, the one he split from quietly and they went their separate ways. He’s not that lucky. 

He’s pulled back to reality by Adrienne asking, “Did you like, hate each other? Are you gonna try and kill each other on sight?”

“I mean, no, but there’s no way it’s not gonna be weird. Why didn’t you tell me he was coming until now?”

“How was I supposed to know? First of all, I didn’t even know until like, today, because all I knew was that Noah invited me and you, and I invited Alexis, and I guess she invited Sam when someone else dropped out?”

“But then-”

Adrienne holds up a finger to shush him. “And second of all, you don’t talk about him. The only time he shows up on your Instagram is like, old professional shots from when you guys worked together. Honestly, I kinda just figured you’d grown apart or whatever.”

Normally, Peter loves Adrienne. He’s pretty confident that she’ll revolutionize the scifi genre one day, if she ever focuses on one idea for long enough to see it through. Right now, though, he just really wants her to stop talking, wants everything to stop shaking the ground for a minute so he can put the box labeled “Sam Ecklund” back on the shelf in a corner of his mind where it belongs. 

She’s waiting for an answer, though, so he says, “Yeah, no, we were best friends since 5th grade, we dated for three and a half years, and then we broke up, and it was messy and we don’t talk. So if there’s any way I can get out of doing this, that’d be great, because I don’t-”

She finally looks up from her phone to give him a look. “Peter, you’re coming. We’ve been planning this for a month.”

“Okay but this-”

“You’re coming. It doesn’t sound like the two of you are gonna strangle each other, so you’re gonna make this work, because Noah and I want you there.”

With that, Peter knows he’s lost. Adrienne is stubborn and Noah is stubborn, but neither of them more so than Peter, until they’re together. It’s a phenomenon that defies rational scientific explanation, but two years of marathon editing sessions and brainstorming parties and also some actual parties scattered throughout have given him plenty of time to map the trends. He doesn’t stand a chance. 

He shoves the Sam box into the darkest corner, changes his mind, pulls it back out to wrap about forty layers of packing tape around it, and then replaces it. He’s tried so hard not to think about Sam for the last two and a half years. He’d finally actually been doing a pretty successful job of it, before he found out that he’d be spending two weeks in a van with the exact person he’d been trying so hard not to think about. 

Adrienne snaps her fingers in his face, clearly not for the first time. “Earth to Peter. Noah’s here.”

Peter slings his duffel bag over his shoulder and heads outside. The van Noah had rented, or borrowed, or something- Peter’s unclear on the specifics of the dealing, and from what he’s heard he wants it to stay that way- is sitting out in front of the building, dented and scratched but reasonably functional looking. 

Noah hops out of the driver’s seat, still humming along to whatever he’d been listening to on the way. “Just gotta grab a couple things from the Target, and then- wait, hold on. Peter, you look like you’re actively fuckin’ dying on me. What happened?”

“So to catch you up to speed,” Adrienne says, throwing her bag in the back, “While you were driving, we discovered that the mystery friend that Alexis is bringing from UCLA- the replacement because the soccer guy or whatever dropped out-”

“Yeah?”

“Peter’s ex.”

“Oh, shit.” Noah studies him for a minute with an intensity that would be weird if Peter wasn’t used to it. He doesn’t understand a lot about Noah, like the way he spent his whole film school career swinging between making psychological thrillers and romcoms and excelling at both of them, but he’s come to accept that this is a mystery beyond the scope of any investigation he could conduct.

“So like, this was a bad breakup,” Noah concludes from whatever he’s learned while staring at Peter. He adds, “It’s not the other Vandal guy, is it?”

Peter just nods, and for once in his life, doesn’t ask questions. Normally, he’d be curious, because jumping to that conclusion should require quite a lot of background information that Noah doesn’t have access to, but right now he’s trying to figure out how to get through the next ten minutes. Graduating college has not prepared him for this situation, and he really wishes he could’ve replaced a gen ed math credit with “Acting Like A Functioning Human In Close Proximity To Your Ex-Best Friend/Boyfriend 101.” It’s distinctly possible he’d need the 200 or even 300-level version, though, or at that point why not make it a 400-level special topics course? Anything other than flying completely fucking blind would be great, really. 

“Peter says they’re not gonna try and kill each other, so hopefully that’s mutual, given that they’ll be here in about a minute.” Adrienne waves her phone, location tracker running. 

“Yeah, that’d be excellent. I gotta go get a toothbrush and some other shit, text me when they get here?” Noah heads off, because as Peter and Adrienne have discussed at length, it’s repulsive to the core of his being to stay for the end of a conversation. 

Adrienne finally looks up from her phone. “I’m sorry this is going down so... fucky. But it’s still gonna be fun, I promise.”

Peter just shrugs halfheartedly in response.

“No, I mean it. It’ll be a good time, and maybe you guys can make up and be friends or something, but if not- oh, shit, I think that’s them.”

A red Prius whips into the parking spot next to them, perfectly spaced between the lines but very fast, classic rock playing so loud he could probably identify the song from outside the car.

“Alexis is from New Jersey,” Adrienne says, by way of explanation before Alexis hops out of the driver’s side and comes over to hug her hello. 

Peter faintly recognizes her from some time she’d visited Adrienne, but he doesn’t know her well. Sam must have made friends with her in the last two years, although he’s not sure how, since she has a Division of Physical Sciences sticker on her car. He wants to ask, but that would mean talking to Sam, or at least about Sam, and he hasn’t figured out how he’s going to do that yet. 

And then Sam is in front of him, and all Peter can think of to say is, “Hey.”

“Hi,” Sam says, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else in the world.

It had been a while since Peter had even seen pictures of him, and he can’t help but categorize by what’s the same and what’s changed. Sam at 22 is not quite as gangly as he’d been even at 19, like he’d kind of grown into his body more. His hair is buzzed shorter on the sides than it used to be, but still painstakingly gelled. His shirts fit him better. _He’s still beautiful,_ Peter’s brain supplies, and he shuts that shit down right away because what he’s not gonna do is accidentally redevelop feelings for Sam right before spending several weeks in close proximity. 

They’d broken up. The box is closed. That was it.

So Peter chucks his bag in the back of the van, and takes the farthest seat from Sam, and when Noah gets back, they get on the road. 

At first, it’s not bad. Noah and Alexis had gotten to know each other by way of fighting for control of the aux cord, and Alexis had won, which was a blessing. Adrienne and Alexis haven’t seen each other in a while, so they’re catching up, and Noah slides in a dry comment here and there, and it doesn’t matter that Sam is clearly trying way too hard to be fun and sociable or that Peter hasn’t said a word. He sits in the back and flips between Twitter and Instagram and texts he’s not getting because the two people that text him the most are in the van. It’s tolerable, even if his brain is quietly spinning wildly out of control because he’s finally starting to process that Sam is here. 

Sam is here, and this trip is going to be wholly impossible, because everything he thought had healed in the years following the breakup had, at most, just scabbed over, and the scabs are getting scraped away. If he could get away with bailing in the middle of the highway and not dying, he’d probably do it. It might hurt less than the constant reminder that he’d been deeply in love. Being in love with your best friend is incredible until it isn’t, and you lose two things at once when it all goes wrong. 

Everything’s a fresh wound again, lacking any of the vitriol they’d thrown at each other during the breakup itself to numb it. He knows he’d been mad, maybe the angriest he’d ever been, and for the most part he remembers why, at least from a logical perspective. Laying it out logically, they’d stopped compromising, and Sam had been snappish as often as he’d been himself so Peter had responded in kind, and their arguments had started cutting deeper, knives shoved into deep insecurities that no one else even knew existed. The checklist of reasons is still there, but he can’t summon up the anger that made it all possible. It leaves him with a pain he can’t diagnose, and under it all there’s something he dares not touch, something that burns and seems far more dangerous than the hurt. He doesn’t know how to talk around any of it, so he doesn’t say anything.

They eat lunch out of the cooler Noah’s stashed in the back, mostly full of water bottles and lunch meats, and bread that’s been thrown somewhere in the trunk, and they stop for dinner in some truckstop in Utah, and Peter still somehow avoids even making eye contact with Sam. His brain has finally rebooted enough that he can at least pay attention to the conversation, and he even comes up with a few things to say that aren’t completely stupid, so he’s starting to think the whole thing might almost be survivable until he looks up and catches Sam laughing at something Alexis had said and his stomach twists into some unrecognizable configuration. If his friends notice that he abruptly stops talking and doesn’t say another word until he falls asleep across the back bench seat, they don’t bring it up. 

Their day two plan is to hike the Grand Staircase, which in itself makes Peter nervous enough that he almost forgets about who he’s going to be hiking with. He can’t remember the last time he did any physical activity that wasn’t walking across campus or carrying camera equipment, and he checks for his inhaler about every four minutes on the drive there. 

They end up taking it slow enough that he only has to use it once, despite Alexis’ initial attempt to set a much faster pace. It’s worth it for the view, absolutely stunning even though he’s never been all that much of a landscape kind of person. Unfortunately, that doesn’t solve the tension, which for the first couple hours had been worn down by exertion and fresh air, but makes a reappearance at lunch. 

It’s stupid how it happens, too. Adrienne starts recounting a story about the professor they’d had last year with an accent that was unfortunate for a camera-based class, because in the first lecture he was talking about the need to “fuckus” the shot well, and Peter joins in to help reenact the class looking around at each other a little scandalized before finally coming to the realization that the word was “focus,” and it’s fun until he glances up and Sam is looking away, face entirely shut down. And if Sam is gonna be mad that he’s made new friends in the time since him, Peter doesn’t feel much of a need to try and be friendly either. He barely speaks the rest of the hike, and he thinks he’s going to get away with it, but Noah and Adrienne have apparently reached a breaking point. 

They corner him when they stop for dinner, trapping him up against the van while Sam and Alexis head into the restaurant, blissfully unaware. 

Noah shoves his hands in his pockets and rocks onto the balls of his feet and back a couple times, glancing at Sam’s retreating back. “Look, I know this is super awkward and all, but can you just fuckin’ talk to each other? I really don’t wanna be a dick and say you guys are ruining this for everyone, but...”

Adrienne cuts in, tired of dancing around the point. “But you’re kinda ruining this for everyone, dude. If you liked each other that much, can’t you be normal for like... two weeks?”

Peter glares at her. “Listen, I offered to drop out, I told you it was gonna be awkward, I don’t know what else you wanted me to do.”

“You weren’t like this when we were hanging out with Devon after you guys broke up.”

“No offense, but I never thought I was gonna marry Devon,” Peter snaps, and then immediately wishes he could take it back. Because yeah, there’d been a time he thought he’d maybe marry Sam one day. They’d still been freshmen or sophomores in college at that point, so he hadn’t been considering it for the near future or anything, but one day he’d looked at Sam and realized he couldn’t picture his future with anyone else. 

And if he still can’t, well. No one else needs to know that. He’s shut them up by coming out with that, at least, which is kind of an accomplishment in itself. 

“Well, fuck, dude,” Adrienne eventually says. 

Peter sighs. “I can try to be nice. But he’s not speaking to me either.”

Noah waves a hand in the direction of the restaurant. “Alexis is talking to him. We had this whole conversation.”

“When?” Peter asks, but they’ve already turned and headed inside. He follows after them, asking, “When did you have this conversation?” but if they answer it’s lost in the noise of the diner.

He tries to act normal at dinner. He tries to keep up his part of the Peter-and-Noah-and-Adrienne dynamic, he tries to get to know Alexis better, and he tries to think of anything to say to Sam, but on that last point he fails miserably. There’s nothing or too much that he wants to say, and it presents as silence that he can’t seem to break no matter how hard he tries. 

They sleep in the van again, and although his body is exhausted from the hike, his brain won’t let him sleep. The hurt that had surfaced with seeing Sam again has settled into a dull, constant ache, smoldering somewhere deep in his bone marrow. If he could figure out how to purge it, he would in a heartbeat, because none of this is fair. They’d broken up, and Sam’s almost definitely dated other people, because Peter had and Sam is much easier to like at first pass. Sam’s not pining over him, and for that matter, he hadn’t thought he was pining over Sam either. 

And even if he’d mentally compared every other person he got close to to Sam, well, that was what happened when you lost your best friend of that many years, right? You keep looking for what you’ve lost?

The third day, he royally fucks up. Noah’s driving again, and they make a bathroom stop just over the Colorado border. Peter scoops up a pack of Twizzlers on the way to the cashier without thinking, adding it to his pretzels and iced tea. It’s not until he gets back in the van and tosses them at Sam that he realizes what he’s done. 

Sam catches them and flips them over in his hands, then over again, staring at the package like he’s holding a grenade with the pin pulled out and doesn’t know where to throw it. It might as well be, at least symbolically. Peter’s just thrown him a piece of Sam and Peter Before, of every road trip they’d ever taken together when they were easy as breathing.

He remembers the last one because it had been just before things had gone knifelike between them, the last month or so when things were still easy.

They’d stopped for gas and so Peter could use the bathroom, and Sam had caught him right before he got out to ask, “Can you grab me Twizzlers?”

“Last time you said they tasted like strawberry-flavored plastic.”

“They do taste like strawberry-flavored plastic, I was absolutely right, and I want some anyway. Please? I’ll promise you my undying love and devotion?”

“Thought I already had that?”

Sam shrugs, overly nonchalant. “Mmm, I don’t know.”

“I’m pretty sure you said that when we stopped for burgers.”

“Fuck, I did. Fine, undying love and devotion, and also I’ll suck your dick when we get to the hotel?”

And yeah, Peter would have bought the Twizzlers anyway, but he wasn’t gonna say no to an offer like that.

So it was a loaded gesture, and not one he’d meant to make. The habit must still be ingrained in some deep neural pathways, presumed dead and long buried but apparently still present. He hopes Sam doesn’t read into it, but even if he does, Peter’s not sure what it is he’ll find.

In the complete absence of anything to say to make this better, he slides into his seat and puts his headphones in and pretends he’s getting a text. Every day of this trip is like running his hand through an open flame, and he’s already getting singed with a week and a half left to go. It matters less and less whether he wants to open the box. The tape is peeling at the edges, threatening to tear away his defenses as fast as he can put them up.


	2. Chapter 2

The fourth day, Adrienne throws the van keys at him, and Peter fumbles and drops them before scooping them up. 

“You’re driving,” she says, rather unnecessarily. 

“Who’s nav?” They’re not making a lot of turns at this point during the drive, but the navigator also has the unspoken but somewhat crucial job of keeping the driver awake so they don’t crash and kill everyone. Adrienne had just driven, so it won’t be her, and he’s hoping for Noah or Alexis, but the pattern is simple enough. He knows who it’ll be even before he asks.

“Uh...” Adrienne counts heads, working through the rotation. “Sam.”

Sam looks up from the game he’s playing on his phone, something vaguely Tetris-y. “What? No. Isn’t it Alexis’ turn?”

Alexis flips him off from where she’s laying across the back seat. “I just navigated. And you refuse to drive, so this is what you get.”

Sam grumbles something else and moves up to the passenger seat, arranging himself into an odd, cross-legged position, which is the only thing that’s happened so far this trip that makes perfect sense to Peter. It would probably take an extinction-level event to get Sam to sit normally, and even that’s not a guarantee.

Peter moves the driver’s seat back and adjusts the mirrors and tries to think of anything to say. He’s never quite managed small talk, and Sam knows that so he’ll know it’s fake, but anything he wants to talk to Sam about is a series of landmines. 

He drives, and Sam is just silent. It’s almost scary how not-Sam the whole thing is. Peter could pull up hundreds of memories of driving with Sam if he wanted to, and Sam was only ever silent when he was asleep, because otherwise he was singing along to whatever disaster of a playlist he’d created for that trip, or they were debating something that doesn’t matter but they were both way too invested, or Sam was just talking about whatever managed to hold his interest for more than an hour lately. This feels more like driving with a ghost. After two hours, Peter comes to the conclusion that he’d rather be listening to Sam sing “Corner of the Sky” on continuous loop if it meant he did anything. 

He had expected Sam to be the first one to break, but the intersection of tension and nothingness wears on him more when he has nothing else to do but look at the road. Finally, he caves. “How’d you meet Alexis? Wasn’t she a biochem major or something?”

Sam doesn’t even seem to register that he’s spoken for a second, and at first it seems like he might not answer at all and just continue to sit there pretending Peter doesn’t exist. 

After another beat, though, he looks up. Out the window, not at Peter, but at least it’s something. “She wrote a song. A duet. She wanted it performed at an open mic night thing, but she didn’t have anyone to do the male part. So she basically showed up after rehearsals for the show I was in and grabbed the first tenor she could find, and that happened to be me.” Peter sneaks a glance and catches a hint of a smile on Sam’s face. “It was fucking ridiculous, actually.”

“What show was that?” Peter’s not used to not knowing these things. He’d never much cared for musical theater on its own, but every play Sam was in had been marked on his phone calendar months in advance, the synopsis bookmarked on his laptop so he could have any idea what Sam was talking about. 

“It was this musical version of _As You Like It?_ Which I didn’t know existed until I auditioned for it, but apparently it does.” 

“Is it good?”

“I mean, it’s not an incredible show, but it was fun. Some of the songs are good and it was kinda cool, because they changed it so like- there are four couples that get married at the end, right? And they made one of them two guys and one two girls, which is cool anyway, but it’s also cool because I’d just written a whole paper on like, queer interpretations of Shakespeare? And modern adaptations and everything. It’s the only paper I’ve actually liked writing in college.”

Peter’s only half-listening to the words Sam’s saying, drawn into the rhythm and the familiarity of the way he talks about things he’s passionate about. He’s under no illusions, this isn’t somehow fixing things, but at least they’ve spoken. It’s something, and he’s realizing now just how much he’s craved even this. 

Noah and Adrienne had basically saved him junior year, after shit had gone so badly wrong with Sam and he’d retreated back into himself. He loves them both dearly for even trying to reach out to him when he was like that, disillusioned and reclusive, let alone staying friends with him for the next two years. He loves spending time with them, the three of them hanging out in one of the rare occasions they’re not working, watching shitty movies and award winning movies back to back. But as much as he loves them, they’re not Sam. 

People had been really right about it being the little things you missed, to a degree that had blindsided Peter. Sam’s 16-tangent, “why yes I have ADHD, how did you guess?” method of storytelling had been one of them, because it was frequently confusing and a little frustrating, and he’d had to remind Sam what he was talking about more than a few times, but he always ended up with a much richer story than he would have otherwise. This is a muted version of that, but it’s still enough to fill that gap just a little, a shop class balsa wood bridge over the chasm. 

He wants to ask more, but he’s not sure where to begin to fill in the emptiness of the last two years. Does he ask about school, or family, or whether or not Sam had done the semester in Europe he wanted to do, or people Sam’s dated since him? All of them feel inadequate or dangerous, and he’s quiet so long that it feels like the window to speak has passed, and they’re just silent again. 

Peter thinks they might go his entire shift without speaking again, but after the first bathroom stop, Sam shifts a little in his seat, clearly working himself up for something. 

Finally, he says, “What was your, like. Final film thing. Senior film? Whatever you call it.” 

Peter doesn’t correct him, because Sam doesn’t like being corrected, and he’s aware of how fragile their wooden bridge is. 

“It was kind of documentary style, actually. Turned out that was how I worked best.” What he doesn’t say is, “It made me miss you, and I’d been doing such a good job of not missing you.”

“Yeah? What was it about?” Peter can’t tell if Sam is genuinely interested or just reciprocating, but he also can’t bring himself to care.

“These kids at college, and then this one girl in their friend group disappears, right? And they don’t know if she’s been kidnapped or if she ran away or what, and they’re making a documentary about the attempt to find her.”

“Oh, shit, that sounds cool. How’d you do on it?” Sam sounds genuinely invested now, and Peter knows exactly the expression Sam would have if he looked over, eyebrows a little furrowed, mouth just slightly open. 

“Pretty well. I think they liked the execution more than the story, which hurt a little, but I guess that’s more my thing anyway.”

“I wanna see this.”

“I can send it to you when I have my computer again. Or we can watch it together, or... something.” And goddammit, he’d pushed too far without thinking, hadn’t he? He’d just been thinking about how big the file was and how inconvenient it’d be to send, and from there it had been an easy hop to them watching it together, but that’s not an easy hop at all. He may as well have burned down that fragile bridge between them in one errant sentence fragment. 

Sam says, “Yeah, maybe,” and in the quick glance Peter chances over at him, his face is unreadable. 

They’re quiet again. Peter doesn’t try to break the silence this time. He can’t stop himself from stealing glances, though, and Sam looks deep in thought every time. It’s hard not to wonder what he’s thinking about, but Peter can’t even begin to guess. He’s finally starting to realize he doesn’t know the inner workings of this Sam very well, although the mannerisms are almost identical. Does Sam hate him for overstepping, for presuming some kind of closeness that they’ve lost, or is he mourning its absence, or something else entirely? Or maybe he’s not even thinking about Peter at all, and Peter’s being too self-centered about the whole thing.

He tries to forget about it and just keep driving. Finally, Adrienne calls it, tells him to pull off at the next exit and take a left to get to their motel. Sam mutters something about that being his job, but he sounds half-asleep anyway, so Peter’s not sure he would have trusted Sam’s navigational abilities at this point. 

Adrienne and Noah go in to get keys, one room for the boys and one for the girls, and the others stay to unload their luggage, which has made its way to every possible corner of the van. 

Peter hands Alexis her bag, then hops up to get his own and Sam’s, which have slid all the way up. 

He jumps down and passes Sam’s duffel to him, and Sam takes it with a nod. “Thanks, ba- bro.”

Sam freezes, and Peter’s brain is reeling, because that was almost “babe,” what else could it have been? It was definitely a long A, and that was the same inflection he’d always said it with. And that would be- Peter backtracks, considering other options. Maybe it had been something else entirely, just a stumble over words and nothing more. They’re all pretty exhausted, and Sam sometimes gets a little tongue-tied late at night. 

He’s almost talked himself out of it by the time he looks at Sam’s face, Sam’s face that never lets him hide any emotion at all and he’s red-flushed and startled and something like furious. Suddenly, the tongue-tied theory makes a lot less sense, and that leaves only that Sam had accidentally almost called him “babe.” And that’s... a lot.

It’s a lot, but Peter’s still not sure where it leaves them. They’ve both slipped up now, both fallen back into old habits, but maybe they’re just bad at breaking patterns once they’ve resurfaced. All he knows for sure is that the ifs and onlys and eithers and ors are circling too fast and making him dizzy, and the packing tape on the box in his mind that holds everything he’s ever felt for Sam is rapidly peeling off.

He slings his bag over his shoulder, wincing as the strap digs itself in, and heads for the motel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi hello this fic isn't dead!! I was busy for a couple of months but now I'm less busy so I'm trying to actually finish this. I know this chapter was short but it's mostly a promise that I haven't abandoned this piece, and the next one should be longer.


	3. Chapter 3

The moment they step foot in the motel, Adrienne pulls a bottle of vodka out of her bag, and Alexis pulls out a case of beer. 

“When the fuck did you buy that?” Sam asks.

“Couple days ago. Doesn’t matter. What matters is we’re doing shots.”

And, okay, Adrienne had bought a bunch of cheesy souvenir shot glasses from the places they’d stopped, but he hadn’t expected them to get _used._

She pours a shot for each of them, and she’s handing them out when the van alarm goes off. 

Adrienne groans. “Fuck, Noah, I thought that thing was too old to even _have_ an alarm.” 

Noah rolls his eyes and gets up to get it.

“I’m not waiting for him,” Alexis says, and downs her shot. Adrienne, Sam, and Peter follow suit, not ready for her to leave them in the dust quite yet. 

It backfires when, a moment later, Noah comes back and says, “You guys drank without me? Come on, another round, then. I’m not getting left out of this.”

They all do, despite the rational part of Peter’s brain screaming that getting very drunk with Sam as things keep getting more and more complicated is a terrible idea, actually. 

Alexis flops onto one of the beds and flips through the five available channels about eight times. She settles on some old horror movie, and the only thing Peter can think is _Sam_ hates _horror movies._ It’s not a thing Sam would ever admit, but the same overactive imagination that makes him a good actor and helps him solve impossible cases also makes him susceptible to fabricated terrors lurking just around corners. 

If Sam is concerned, though, he doesn’t show it, although he does kind of angle himself away from the TV, scrolling through Instagram and occasionally glancing up at the screen. Maybe it’s unintentional. Maybe Peter’s overanalyzing. 

Adrienne says, “Alexis, you’d be the final girl in a horror movie,” and Alexis says, “What?” and Peter recognizes the gleam in Noah’s eye because Noah adores sorting things as much as he adores being unable to be sorted. 

“The final girl is a horror movie trope referring to the last girl left alive. It used to always be the virgin, because if you had sex you basically immediately just died, because fuckin', you know, misogyny, but it kinda seems like it’s moving more towards her actually being super capable, so she’s confronting the killer with some kind of survival skills,” Noah explains. 

“Oh. Okay. Fucking sick.” Alexis cracks a beer and takes a sip. “What’s everyone else, then?”

“Peter’s probably the scientist, just because he’d constantly be trying to analyze the situation.” Peter just kind of shrugs, because Noah’s not _wrong,_ and there are worse things he could be. 

“Sam... kill the cutie,” Noah says with a smirk. 

“I’m a grown ass man!” Sam protests. “I’m not cute!” Peter’s with him on this one because Sam is hot or gorgeous or even beautiful and god, he’s a lightweight if two shots can catch his thoughts ablaze so easily. 

“Offing the mouth,” Alexis says instead, and Peter’s grateful that she’s cut off that train of thought. “You make one snide comment too many and someone finally kills you for it, instead of just thinking about it like I do.”

Sam snorts. “I mean, I can leave if you don’t want me here.” He stands before Alexis pulls him back down. 

“Shut up. Okay, who haven’t we gotten?”

“Me,” Adrienne says.

“Token black character,” Noah says immediately, and Adrienne flips him off, giggling a little.

“I don’t care if you’re probably right, you could’ve pretended to at least think about it more.” 

It’s refreshing to know Peter’s not the only one that’s headed for drunk, at least. 

“We haven’t gotten Noah,” Sam says. He’d gone quiet again, shredding what looks like a gas station receipt, but at least he’s talking now. That’s something. 

This is one Peter knows, despite Noah’s attempts to evade categorization. “Death by genre savviness. For sure. He’d be mid-monologue about how how much genre conformity all of our deaths have and he’d suddenly get murdered.”

Noah nods, and Peter feels like he’s gotten a good grade on a test. “Morbid. Probably accurate.” 

“Cool,” Sam says. “So, I’m not sleeping tonight.” 

It plays successfully as a joke, and Peter wonders if maybe it really is, if Sam’s outgrown his fear and Peter’s looking for something that’s no longer there. 

He wants to analyze Sam fully, wants to know everything that’s changed and all the things that have stayed the same, wants to know how much of the information he’s stored away so neatly no longer belongs to the person in front of him, but to do that he’d have to talk to Sam, and that’s proving hard. It’s so hard, and it’s not fair because Sam used to be the one person it didn’t take effort to talk to. 

Adrienne bumps his shoulder once lightly, then again harder when he doesn’t react, and he realizes he’s been sort of-almost staring at Sam. She gives him a look that starts with “stop” and ends with something harder to read, something that might share DNA with pity.

Alexis starts them playing poker, although half of them don’t know how to play and are just going off her cheat sheets hastily scribbled on the motel notepad. They also break into the beers, because the shots weren’t a bad enough idea. 

Peter picks up on the system quickly but is terrible at betting, and to her credit, Alexis doesn’t make fun of him too much. It doesn’t help that he’s trying very hard not to watch Sam, which ends with him allowing himself glimpses of Sam’s hands as he places his cards, Sam’s hair as he runs his fingers through it in frustration, and that’s about as far from a winning strategy as you can get. 

Partway through, Noah just gets up and wanders off, presumably heading back into the other room. 

Sam tilts his head and points off in the general direction Noah had gone. “Where did-”

“He does that,” Peter says. Two beers and the shots in, talking to Sam is a lot easier. 

Adrienne snorts, and adds, “Don’t try to make sense of Noah. Peter did for about three months and I think it almost broke him.”

Peter flips her off, even though she’s absolutely correct. 

They go back to the game, although it’s not quite as much fun with only four people, especially when three of them still don’t really understand poker. Peter’s trying, but Alexis’s handwriting is bad, and the cheat sheet is even harder to read when he’s a little buzzed, so he can’t keep up with what’s worth what. Sam’s not even trying anymore, just pulling faces and trying to get someone to call his bluffs.

Eventually, Alexis gives up. “Alright, I’m tired of cleaning you guys out of your chips. Boys, go home.”

Sam and Peter say goodnight and head next door, sleeping arrangements already planned out so they don’t have to share. Sharing a van seat is one thing, although they’ve mostly even avoided doing that, but this is different, and all of Peter’s warning systems say it’s better to stay away. 

Except when they get there, Noah’s passed out in one bed, sprawled across the whole thing and taking up more space than anyone should logically be able to take up. So that represents a very significant disruption to the sleeping arrangements, one that Peter’s brain is rapidly attempting to correct for. 

He comes up blank. “So... now what?”

“I mean. We can share the bed? I feel like we should be able to handle that, we’re grown ass adults.” 

In theory, Sam is right. It should be that simple. It’s just sleeping in a bed for a few hours, on separate sides, and it doesn’t need to mean anything. The problem is, the theory and the reality almost definitely won’t match up. Psychological effects of sleeping next to someone aside, Sam is a leech who always moves towards heat no matter how deep a sleep he’s in, so it wouldn’t matter where they started out. They’d end up next to each other, and there’s nothing about that situation that could possibly end well. 

“I’ll squeeze in with Noah. It’s fine, I don’t want to mess up the arrangement.” Maybe Sam will buy that, because Peter does like structure, but just in case he adds, “You always steal the blankets anyway.” It’s true, but it’s also an attempt to lighten the mood, because Sam’s face fell the second Peter chose two square feet of space over him. It shouldn’t matter, but it still twists something inside of Peter to see Sam upset. He’s not even sure what Sam’s disappointment means, and the fact that not knowing is becoming a common thread makes him uneasy. 

He makes himself turn away and go to brush his teeth. When he comes back, he crawls into the tiny space Noah’s left him, curling into himself and cramping within seconds. It’s fucking miserable, but it’ll have to do. 

Sam comes out from the bathroom a few minutes later and pauses for a second when he sees Peter, like he’s teetering on the edge of saying something, but he elects to say nothing and turn out the light 

Peter falls asleep surprisingly fast, aided by the alcohol, and doesn’t wake up when Noah rolls. He _does_ wake up when, as a result, he crashes to the ground, landing flat on his back and with the wind nearly knocked out of him. He struggles for breath for a second, trying to figure out what’s going on and why his lungs feel like they’ve left his chest entirely. 

Sam’s voice comes from his right, quiet and groggy with sleep. “Are you okay?”

If the shock of the fall wasn’t enough, the shock of Sam willingly talking to him is more than sufficient to wake him up. “I’m fine.”

He finally catches his breath and pushes himself up off the floor, and is blindly trying to find a spot on Noah’s bed to crawl back in when Sam speaks again. “Pete, dude, just come to bed. I know I’m like, the fucking worst or whatever, but it’s better than sleeping on the floor.”

Peter’s pride protests, but Peter’s back protests louder, so he surrenders and feels his way over to Sam’s bed, tripping on someone’s shoe along the way. He crawls in and stays as far to the edge as he can, pulling a corner of the blanket over him. 

Sam makes a combination snort-scoff noise behind him and throws a little more of the blanket over him, but doesn’t say anything else. 

Peter’s almost asleep when he remembers what Sam had said. He says quietly, into the dark, “You’re not the fucking worst.” 

Sam doesn’t reply, breathing gone soft and even. Peter would be lying if he said the sound didn’t calm him, despite everything, and he drifts off to sleep a few minutes later. 

He wakes up with a familiar warmth against his spine. For a moment, his world is narrowed down to the weight of Sam at his back and his steady breathing. For a moment, he’s content in some other life where they have never been anything but this. 

It can’t last. The realization hits and he freezes, blood systematically replaced with ice. This isn’t them, not anymore. It’s not, and it hasn’t been since the argument, and his whole history with Sam is being unpacked whether he wants it to be or not. 

In his brain it’s just “The Argument,” no clarification necessary. They’d been fighting more and more leading up to it, but that was the point of no return, and Peter remembers everything in perfect, Technicolor detail. They’d been joking when it started, talking about the future, but some misplaced jab had taken it from a normal conversation to teeth bared, knives in ribs. It infuriates him sometimes that he’s missing that piece, the hammer that drove the final nail into the coffin, but he could tell you everything they said at the breaking point.

His own voice: “You’re so fucking terrified of growing up, and I’m sorry, but I’m fucking tired of accommodating it.”

Sam’s voice: “Fuck you, dude. You’re gonna wake up one day and you’re gonna be alone because you drove away all the people who gave a shit about you.”

His own voice again: “At least I don’t change my whole personality to get people to like me.”

And Sam: “Fuck you, Peter. I hope your whole ‘brutally honest’ thing works for your next boyfriend, because I can’t do this shit anymore.”

Peter: “Why the fuck would I want a boyfriend who doesn’t even like me? I’m better off without you, if that’s what you really think.”

They’d said more after that, but it hadn’t mattered. It was over. And now Sam is asleep beside him and Peter wants to forgive, wants to beg forgiveness in return, and it’s not fair because he doesn’t want to want that. He wants to leave this behind before they fuck it all up again and are left heartbroken, wants to pack the box of Sam up again and shove it back in a dark corner, wants the ember in his chest to go out before it turns into the kind of wildfire that reduces everything in its path to rubble and ash. 

It doesn’t matter, though. He wants this anyway, because the fighting had brought him to dark places but before that Sam had been woven through every cell, building him up stronger. They’d both been better together. 

He needs to be able to think about it logically, especially early in the morning when his brain hasn’t quite woken up to mount a full defense. He reaches out and takes the hotel notepad and pen, shifting carefully to avoid waking up Sam, and then he charts it out. 

Pros of getting back with Sam:  
-I know him. He knows me. Minimal learning curve.  
-I was more innovative being around him.  
-He’s a good person and he made me want to be better.  
-He’s funny and smart and talented and I loved being around him. 

Cons of getting back with Sam:  
-Already broke up once.  
-I was severely depressed for three months after we broke up.  
-Our arguments are incredibly nasty.  
-I have no idea if he wants to get back together.  
-Don’t know if our post graduation plans are compatible. 

Listed like that, the cons far outweigh the pros, but he knows deep down he’s holding something back. He can attempt to quantify all he wants, but that won’t account for the main thing. He takes a deep breath and writes, “I’m still in love with him.”

And that’s it, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter what the logical thing to do is. He’s in love with Sam and that’s always fucked up his ability to make rational plans. 

He pulls the page off the notepad, folds it into neat quarters, and sticks it in the pocket of his pajama pants. Then he settles back down in bed, unable to keep himself from pretending for a few moments more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think this might be the second to last chapter, but at one point I did think the whole thing was only gonna be two chapters, so who knows really. Also, the comments you guys have left absolutely make my day, I really cannot express how happy they make me.

**Author's Note:**

> I was hoping I could finish the whole thing before the exchange but it just kept getting longer lmao so. the second half(ish) will hopefully be out soon?


End file.
